About the Stringtown Ambassadors

Arlo Blaisus began his journey with the instrument at age fifteen, sitting elbow to elbow with fiddlers and banjo pickers in Northwest Arkansas, and developed a rugged, fiddly style as a result of his sessions with the Old 78s and local irish fiddler, Sara White. At eighteen years, he took a life-changing leap to western North Carolina, and began his trek into the realms of Appalachian old time music. He’s a jam band mandolinist, his Irish style reminisces of a thrumming bouzouki, and his old time tunes run like dancer’s footsteps across the fretboard.

Rosalind Parducci peppers her playing with bluesy, moody tones, salts it with classical clarity, and breathes rhythm into the bow. In the beginning, she sat in a class of hair-raising first-time violinists, scratching across the strings, and in her desperation, she begged her mother for private lessons. Her mother made a work-trade with her teacher so that Rosalind could study viola for several years, and she bounced along the classical path until she landed at a local Irish session. Between the influences of the Scots-Irish community in Grass Valley, CA, and her experience in the local jazz scene, Rosalind’s musical upbringing was widely scattered and rich. The old time fiddle tunes that she learned in western North Carolina have given her an eclectic synchronicity: every Irish tune she plays hints at the old time dance fiddler that she is, just as her old time tunes are tinted with a raw, Celtic edge.